Saturday, December 10, 2016

Want to continue your genealogical education throughout the year but have a limited travel budget? The 2017 Jamboree Webinar Extension Series of the Southern California Genealogical Society offers some of the best offerings from its Jamboree conference presentations throughout the year and makes them accessible to you in your home.

Genealogies record family relationships. Health histories reveal causes of death, disabilities, chronic diseases, or known genetic disorders within families. How can you build an accurate family health/medical history? Should you? Can genealogists lead the way to personalized healthcare/medicine?

For those of you who are not familiar with Beth's background, here is a summary of why I am delighted to partner with her: Beth Balkite was a certified genetic counselor for over 30 years. She is an alum of the Graduate Program in Human Genetics at Sarah Lawrence College. She worked as a genetic counselor in Connecticut at the University of Connecticut Health Center, Yale University, and Norwalk Hospital prior to joining Genzyme Genetics as manager of Clinical Genetics Services in 1993. In 1998 she was hired as Genetics Education Strategy Advisor for GlaxoSmithKline. She has continued as a genetics educator in several capacities before retiring in 2012. She has studied her own family history for years and is now one of just two genetic counselors to practice and teach genetic genealogy. She is an instructor at the Osher Life Long Learning Institute (OLLI) at Duke University in Durham, NC, where she teaches a course “Applying DNA to Your Family Tree.” In the summer of 2016 she taught a session in the Advanced Genetic Genealogy course at GRIP (Genealogy Research Institute of Pittsburgh).